Slot Machines for Bars in Chicago Lawn, Chicago

History

Farms and a few scattered settlements covered this ground until the 1920s. Then developers drew stockyard managers and skilled workers to a new belt of bungalows, and the population climbed from 14,000 in 1920 to 47,000 in 1930. Germans and Irish leaving Back of the Yards and Englewood came first, followed by Poles, Bohemians and Lithuanians.

Lithuanians, who had settled first in Bridgeport, made Marquette Park a center of their own, and their institutions earned the community there the label Lithuanian Gold Coast. The Sisters of St. Casimir opened Holy Cross Hospital in 1928. The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish, founded in 1927, raised its church on Washtenaw Avenue in 1957 with Lithuanian folk architecture in its design.

Marquette Park gave the area its second name. The South Park Commission began buying the land in 1878, and the Olmsted Brothers drew plans for it in 1903 as part of 14 new neighborhood parks, Marquette the largest. A 1935 monument, paid for by public subscription, honors the aviators Darius and Girenas.

The area today

Chicago Lawn sits about eight miles southwest of the Loop. Marquette Park, more than 300 acres at Marquette Road and California Avenue, takes up much of the south end, and residents often use its name for the whole neighborhood. It holds a lagoon, a nine-hole golf course, a rose garden, tennis courts and baseball fields, and federal relief funds turned its golf shelter into a fieldhouse soon after 1935. The Chicago Public Library dedicated the Chicago Lawn Branch in 1960.

63rd Street is the main commercial artery. The 52 Kedzie bus runs north from Kedzie and 63rd, and the 63rd Street bus runs between Midway's Orange Line station and Stony Island Avenue, so both corridors carry CTA service.

Bars and restaurants here

On 63rd Street, from Western Avenue out past Kedzie, the licenses are mostly restaurants: taquerias and sit-down kitchens, among them a Caribbean one, licensed to serve alcohol alongside the food, with a tavern just west of Kedzie. South of 63rd, Kedzie Avenue has taverns, and 71st Street has neighborhood bars of its own. 59th Street also has a taqueria. A room near 63rd and Kedzie sits on two bus routes. If you run a room here, you work on a street where kitchens and taverns share the blocks.